Da Vinci's Demons: How Leonardo Da Vinci is Like Batman

David Goyer discusses his new Starz series.

by: Eric Goldman

January 5, 2013

David Goyer is known for his scripts for comic book adaptations like The Dark Knight and Blade trilogies (and coming up, Man of Steel), and speaking about his new TV series, Da Vinci’s Demons, at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour today, he noted, “I’d never done anything historical and period.” That being said, Goyer said that he felt Da Vinci is “kind of super hero-y anyway!”

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Besides being a great artist, Goyer noted Da Vinci was “also an inventor and war engineer. He was a writer and swordsman and there are stories about being able to bend iron bars with his bare hands.”

The show focuses on a young Da Vinci, played by Tom Riley and Goyer noted there were actually a few correlations between Batman and Da Vinci, including Bob Kane basing Batman’s cape design on Da Vinci’s flying machine design, and both men (even if only one was real) having issues with missing parents and important moments in caves – Goyer noted that Da Vinci wrote about “Something horrific that happened to him in a cave,” which will be explored on the series.

Goyer said Da Vinci’s Demons was 80-85% based on fact, but “embellished with what we’re calling historical fantasy.” As he explained, “One of the theme’s of the show is history is a lie, constantly being overwritten by the winners,” describing Da Vinci’s Demons as “the secret history of the man who invented the future. “

Besides making some real historical figures a bit older or younger than they would have been at the time, he also explained that there were some real life people where, “We don’t know for a fact that Da Vinci met [them], but we’ve taken the leap.” One of these people will be Vlad Dracul. So yes, Da Vinci vs. Dracula may happen on this series! As Goyer noted, the series is, “Primarily meant to be a fun piece more than anything.”

As viewers of Starz have come to expect with series like Spartacus and Boss, Da Vinci’s Demons doesn’t hold back when it comes to sex scenes. But while the early episodes have Da Vinci involved with women, it doesn’t seem the show will ignore speculation that he was gay. While Riley didn’t get specific, he simply said, “He’s a man who wasn’t going to be constrained by the society he was within.”

Goyer said that approaching the series, “I didn’t want to do 'ye olde historical drama.' It's something historical, but viewed through a modern prism.” And while he is adding embellishments, he also noted, “Some really crazy things happened in the year our show takes place and we’ll explore those in the first season.”

When Da Vinci died, 13,000 pages were found that he left behind, containing his ideas for inventions like a machine gun and the submarine, but Goyer said that within a year, 7,000 of those pages had gone missing. “We’ll introduce those pages in the show,” he revealed, saying the challenge the show’s production designers faced was coming up with Da Vinci-style ideas and art that could appear to match the real thing.